Wishsh

Chapter 1

Saju woke up on a Sunday before sunrise and rushed to the beach even before his parents were up. This was his last vacation before high school.

He wanted to build his sandcastle before sunrise. He cherished the first rays doing the grand reveal of his creation with a background score of ocean waves breaking on the shore.

This day turned out even grander though. When Saju picked up some dry sand to blow over his finished castle just when the sun appeared at the horizon, he saw that the pretend pixie dust was not falling on the castle. Instead it kept rising and shimmering much more radiantly in the sun. It was moving randomly but also taking some form at the same time. Like those misty clouds on the hills except made of sand. As he kept trying to figure out the form, suddenly he heard a whisper. “Wishsh”. He thought he was just seeing and hearing patterns where none existed. But he heard it again. “Wishsh”.

“Water,” said Saju as if trying to run an experiment to disprove a weird thought.

Barely seconds after he said it, a small water bottle appeared next to him as if it had always been there. There was no pretense to it.

He couldn’t fully register what had happened but his mind and mouth were eager to try some more. He blurted out “Bagels” as soon as he heard another whisper from the floating sand. And of course in a blink of an eye there it was: a plate of bagels placed unassumingly on the beach next to Saju’s castle and the water bottle covering some of his digging gear.

Do I only have 3 wishes like in the stories? I’d better ask for 3 more. Saju had always thought of doing this if he ever met a Genie. But suddenly he thought of an even grander wish today. What if all the sand particles in this beach become magical and every person in this whole world gets to enjoy infinite wishes? And even before his wish was fully formed in his mind he saw a big gush of wind blowing away sand from the beach. It was the most elegant sandstorm Saju had ever seen.

Chapter 2

Maya, Kia, Leo, Nina and countless other people woke up that morning to a little surprise. When they opened their front doors to pick up milk or newspaper or go out to schools or work they all were greeted by a small jar with swirling sand inside it and their names written on the jar in their own handwriting.

Anyone who opened the jar heard the sand make a “Wishsh” sound and a few whispered things like candy and money and cake and toys. To each and everyone’s surprise just the next moment they had what they desired. This Sunday was turning out to be great!

The first week was genuinely the best week the world had ever had, and Saju, who was the only person who knew where the jars had come from, felt quietly enormous about it. Nobody was left hungry anymore.

Next Sunday, Saju went for a walk. The two brothers who slept behind the fish market had their own rooms now, with fans, and they kept the fans on all night because they could. He walked a little further to reach what used to be a withering house full of withering people. Old people who had been putting off knee and eye operations with not a proper tooth in their mouths used to live there. But today they were seen chatting about the good old days with a fresh coat of plaster on the house as well as on them. Every house that leaked stopped leaking. The doctor at the government hospital sat in an empty corridor for the first time in thirty-one years and did not know what to do with her hands.

Chapter 3

Saju enjoyed his walks because he got to see the good he had silently bestowed upon the world. Today he went to the market where there were huge hoardings. There were four of them on the market road, and all four had the same face on them in different clothes, brown hair falling in one smooth piece, skin with the finish of a new fridge, teeth like a row of identical white tiles, and that particular closed-mouth laugh which does not disturb the rest of the face. That was the face everyone wished they were born with.

In Saju’s building it was Kia’s cousin who went first. She came down on Thursday evening looking like the hoarding and everyone made a noise of appreciation, and by Saturday four more people in the building had made the same noise about each other. Saju’s own mother did it on a Sunday, in the afternoon, quietly, and came out of her room and stood in the doorway waiting for him to say something nice.

Saju said it looked good. Then he went and sat on the steps for a while.

Inside a month every person Saju passed on the road had the same hair and the same finish and the same tidy laugh, and the road was so much quieter than before, because there was not much to say to a person you were already looking at in the mirror every morning. Nobody had a crooked nose anymore. Nobody had the gap in the front teeth that Saju’s uncle used to whistle through, and nobody had his cousin’s ears either, which had been extremely large and which Saju missed more than he expected to.

Chapter 4

Maya lived up in the green valley behind the town, and Maya loved colours, which in a place like the beautiful valley of Saju’s town was not a difficult thing to love.

She did not wish for the perfect face. Instead she held her jar up in the garden and whispered for a while and what came out of the soil that night was something nobody had a name for, so she named it herself: Sun-Dancer. In the day the flowers were plain and black and slightly boring, and they spent the whole day taking in sunlight without giving anything back. Then the light went, and one by one they lit up. Green, then blue, then a violet you could read a book by, turning slowly on their stalks in the breeze as if they were stars being puppeteered by the soil upwards. Only Maya could have thought of a wish so creative and beautiful!

People came from four villages to sit along Maya’s fence at night. Nobody wished for a Sun-Dancer of their own, which Maya noticed and was proud of, because it meant they wanted to see them rather than have them.

Leo lived next door. Leo had the hair and the finish and the tidy laugh, exactly like the hoardings, and he ate the same healthy but tasty food that everyone in the town was wishing for and eating these days. He stood at his window savoring his sandwich for three nights and watched people walking past his gate to get to hers.

On the fourth night he took out his jar and asked for a tower. Ten times taller than Maya’s house, he said, and covered in bright red rubies, and he must have said it very clearly because that was precisely what he got.

It was, Saju heard later, a beautiful tower. In the afternoon the gems threw red light all the way down the valley and people stopped in the road to look up at it with their hands over their eyes, and hardly anyone went to Maya’s fence.

The next morning the tower’s shadow lay across Maya’s garden like a wet blanket, and it stayed there. The Sun-Dancers went the whole day without a drop of light to drink. That night they did not open. They stood in the dark being plain and black.

Maya cried and Leo sat at the top of his tower with the entire valley in front of him. He was relieved but felt shrunken while standing tall on his tower. He could not hear a single person laughing in the valley that day.

Chapter 5

One day Saju went to see Kia by the bridge. Kia was the best diver on the bridge and had been for two summers, and the way she got to be the best was extremely boring. She went there every single afternoon and practiced diving again and again. But once in a while she would ask her friends to come and see her perform.

The bridge was old wood, high enough to be a bad idea, and the river under it was deep and cold. Kia had spent two years on one thing, a double flip, and for most of those two years she had been landing it flat on her back, or worse, flat on her face. She knew the exact sound her back made on the water when she entered wrong. When she finally came out of the second turn clean and went in feet first with almost no splash at all, there were four people watching and one of them was her little brother, and Kia climbed out of that river feeling as if she had been elected Mayor or something.

The audience pointed to her jar and she asked for the obvious thing. Make me jump ten times higher, she said, and make five flips easy.

It worked the way everything worked that month. She stepped off the bridge and went up instead of down, hung there long enough to see the roofs of the town, turned five times without any effort at all and entered the water like a spoon going into rice porridge. The crowd on the bank applauded!

Kia climbed up and did it again.

She did it a third time and a fourth time and on the fifth she noticed she was thinking about lunch on the way down, which was weird because back when she could still fail she would have been worrying instead about that small neck bend at the end of the first roll.

That was the whole problem and she worked it out sitting on the edge of the bridge with her legs hanging over the water. There was nothing at the bottom of the jump anymore. Before, there had been the sound her back made, and the two years, and the four people watching, and now there was a thing that happened correctly every time whether she was paying attention or not. She could no longer be bad at it, which meant she could no longer be good at it either.

She left the jar at home the next afternoon and promised never to bring it to her dives again.

Chapter 6

Down in the town, things went quiet in a way that took a while to notice.

Nina stopped going to school, and she was the last one to do it, because there was no argument left for it. She held the jar up one evening and by morning she had every word and every number and every poem and every fact in her head. There was no being ignorant or wrong anymore. For about a week she had access to all of human knowledge right in her brain, exactly as she had wished. But soon she started to find that her own thoughts had a strange second-hand quality to them, like a room furnished entirely out of somebody else’s house. She knew the answer to everything and could not remember working out any of it. When she tried to think about a problem, the answer simply arrived, and after some weeks of this Nina began to feel that there was no particular reason for her to be present or thinking at all.

The gym near the bus stand shut. The joggers and the cyclists slowly disappeared. If you wanted to be fit or gain muscle, all you had to do was ask the jar for the arms, and the arms came, and then you sat down with them.

Cricket was an unexpected and immediate casualty. Saju was there to witness it. Two teams from the colony met for their monthly match. Everyone had made their prayers and wishes that morning. The first ball came out of the bowler’s hand at a speed that made a sonic boom. The batsman hit it casually and the ball shot over the coconut trees like a rocket never to be seen again. Next ball, same thing. Nobody even ran because there was no point running when the ball was never coming back and the score went up by six whether you moved or not. They got through four overs and then the batsman put the bat down in the middle of the pitch and said, this is not it, and everyone agreed and went home. Nobody said what “it” was but everybody knew.

The shops went last and they went completely. There is no bakery in a town where bread just appears. There was no toy shop either, no ice cream trolley with the bell, no man who fixed cycles, no queue anywhere, and therefore nobody standing in a queue behind somebody they might otherwise never have spoken to. The corner of the road that had been the busiest corner of the road became just a corner.

By the end of the second month people sat out on their porches in the evening, surrounded by things they had asked for and not even opened or used, all of them wearing the same face, watching a street where nothing was going to happen.

Saju sat on his own steps with his jar in his pocket and did the arithmetic he had been avoiding for weeks, which was that there were about eight billion of these jars in the world and every single one of them was his idea.

Chapter 7

He went to the beach that Sunday because he could not think of anywhere else to go. He went at the wrong time, in the evening, when the sun was going down into the water and turning the whole sky an unlikely pink.

He was surprised to see that the sand was coming back. So shocked that he took cover behind an abandoned boat. Nobody fished anymore.

It came in low over the flats from every direction at once, not in a storm this time but in long quiet lines, billions of grains arriving from billions of doorsteps and settling on the beach where they had started. Saju was watching and hearing intently.

Then the sand began to talk not to Saju but to itself. Saju couldn’t make sense of much at all. All he heard again and again was “Wishsh” as before. But he was confident that the sand was apologetic and confused as to why people were sad even though it was giving them what they wanted. Instantly.

Saju got lost in his own thoughts while the sand kept hissing and wheezing. Were envy and greed making people sad? Greed couldn’t be it because any greed would be fulfilled by these infinite grants. And envy seemed more like a fever than the root cause.

Suddenly he heard another sound which was repeated by the sand again. It was not Wishsh this time. The sand picked up some water from the ocean and dropped it in a precise way to make the sound.

“Shwooodledup,” it said. Repeatedly. Excitedly.

The rest of the beach took it up. It went around the whole bay, Shwooodledup, Shwooodledup, as if it had figured out something. As if facepalming how it could have got this wrong.

Saju lay behind the boat and turned the sound over and could make nothing of it, and then he thought about hordes of similar-looking people. He thought about his mother, and about his cousin’s ears, and about the four hoardings on the market road. And it stopped being a nonsense sound. He could see it now himself. Shwooodledup was the thing they had taken from people. Not just their looks. The whole business of being one particular person and nobody else, crooked nose and enormous ears and all. It is a stupid thing to be proud of but every single human being is proud of it anyway, and the world had handed it over in a few months for a face off a hoarding.

The sand went quiet after that for a while, letting Saju dwell on this thought a bit.

But there was again that uncertain disturbance throughout the beach as if it was not over yet. The sand toiled and tumbled and brushed off the nearby trees in uncertain patterns, just as he had seen Kia in her practice sessions at the bridge. The wind blew the sand particles in a zig-zag fashion just like Nina’s math homework all scribbled out, when she is trying to reach the correct answer.

Soon there was that synchronized movement of the sand again. Then a second sound came, from further along, sharper, with a hiss in the middle of it.

“Sizzzlegrit.”

He got that one faster, because he had heard Kia’s back hit the water from the bridge two summers running. It was the sound of the two years. It was going up the hill again after landing flat, and the four overs of cricket that nobody wanted, and Nina sitting inside a head full of answers she had never once had to reach for. Everything worth having had a cost attached to it, and the jars had very politely removed the cost, and taken Sizzzlegrit along with it.

“Wishsh,” said the whole beach, all together, and there was no mistaking that one at all.

Saju stood up. “I know,” he said. “Give back Shwooodledup and Sizzzlegrit!”

The whole beach settled down in a wave. A wave that started on the far ends of the beach and reached Saju in a reverse ripple as if bowing to him and then the sand just stopped moving.

“Can you give it back?”

The beach made no sound whatsoever.

Chapter 8

The jars were empty in the morning. Billions of jars, sitting on bedsides and window sills and kitchen shelves completely empty, with a name on the side in handwriting that people had almost forgotten was theirs.

Saju’s mother came out of her room and she had her own face on. There was the small mole below her left eye, and the nose that went slightly to one side, and the front tooth that had never quite lined up, and she put her hand up to it in the doorway and started laughing in her cute little laugh before she said anything. He heard his uncle come up the stairs whistling some funny melody through the gap in his teeth, all the way to the terrace. Shwooodledup.

Out on the road there were short people and tall people and one man so wide he had to angle himself through the gate, and everybody was staring at everybody, and the road was loud again by nine o’clock.

Maya woke up with red hair, curly and completely unmanageable, which she had not asked for. Leo’s tower was gone. In its place there was a shed with a spade, a watering can and a bag of seeds labelled “Sun-Dancers”, and no shadow at all crossing over on Maya’s side of the fence.

Maya’s garden was barren. And it looked like nothing could grow in this rectangle unless she prepared it for months.

Leo stood at the fence for a long time before he got the words in order. If you show me how to plant the seeds, he said, I’ll carry the water up from the river and help you with your garden. Then he showed her the seeds. Maya looked at the dead rectangle and then at him and said the soil in it was ruined and it was going to take them the rest of the year, but the prospect brought the most beautiful smile to her face.

Nina’s head was ordinary and quiet, and it took her most of the day to work out one sum on paper. But once she got it she kissed the paper.

The school reopened on Monday with no announcement. Somebody got the shutters open at the bakery on Tuesday, and the smell came down the road at four in the afternoon, and people stood in a queue for it and talked to the person in front of them about nothing at all.

The cricket started again in the evening, with one bat that had a crack in it. The bowler ran in and bowled something wide and apologetic. The batsman swung at it, missed completely, and the whole ground cheered him anyway. They needed three attempts, a lot of running and one argument to get a single run, and Saju, who was fielding at square leg, thought that it was more or less the correct amount of trouble for one run. Sizzzlegrit.

Most people kept the jars. Saju’s mother put her makeup in hers. Nina put pens. Leo put seeds in his and Maya put worms in hers.

Saju kept two slips of paper with funny words written on them.